Philippa Hetherington

I study the cultural, social and legal history of imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union in transnational context, with particular attention to histories of gender and sexuality, migration, and (inter-)imperial governance. My current book project, ‘Circulating Subjects: The Traffic in Women and the Construction of an International Crime,’ examines the emergence of ‘trafficking in women’ as a specific social problem in turn of the century Russia, linking this to the development of international humanitarian law, global migratory regimes and gendered understandings of subjecthood. Trained as a Russian historian, I am especially interested in Eurasia’s place in the globalizing world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By examining the gendered history of migration (particularly emigration) from this region, I explore how certain conceptions of gendered and sexualized bodies become central to questions of state security and sovereignty.

I come to the University of Sydney from Harvard University, where I completed my PhD in History in May 2014. While there I received a Graduate Certification in Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality (SWGS) and sat on the tutorial board for the SWGS undergraduate program, as well as serving as a fellow of the Edmund J. Safra Center for the Study of Ethics at Harvard Law School (2013-­‐2014). My research, conducted in archives and libraries in Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S., has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (US) and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, among others.